Bullet Physics 2.76 SDK Available

Bullet Physics is a professional open source (C++) collision detection, rigid body and soft body dynamics library. The library is free for commercial use under the ZLib license. Bullet is available for all major platforms including PS3, XBox 360, Wii, PC, Linux, Mac OSX and iPhone.

Bullet Physics will have an OpenCL hardware acceleration in the next major update (branch 3.xx). Version 2.76 prepares this OpenCL support with modifications in MiniCL (the OPenCL driver of Bullet).

This challenge led DD to develop a new simulation system called Drop. “Our software team built it around a fast, open-source engine called Bullet,” Leo says. “Bullet was the core solver, but we established a system for generating and breaking constraints and for assigning material properties to objects. That allowed us to do things that are very difficult for rigid body solvers, such as concave objects and organic shapes where collisions become very complicated. Drop is tremendously fast, and it allowed artists to iterate on a fairly long simulation in an hour or two. We were able to simulate tens of thousands of colliding objects.